Buying an iPhone and learning Objective-C/C++

I've made the decision to not only buy a 3G iPhone, but a Mac Mini as well so I can try my hand at developing for it. Why? Well I'd been considering getting an iPhone for a while and 8 of my colleagues at work (out of 27) bought one last month. Two of them have even started developing apps for it. In July 2008 the App Store opened and took about $1 million each day of which it passed 70% back to the developers. Many apps are provided free with others ranging from 1$ to $10 or more. It's a bit of a gold rush for developers!

There are non-Apple iPhone development tools and you can compile Objective C/Objective C++ with the GNU Compiler Collection (aka GCC) but I suspect (tell me If I'm wrong) that that restricts you to 'Jail Break' applications. These are unapproved applications which only run on an unlocked iPhone.

There is a cat and mouse game between Apple, because rightly or wrongly Apple insists on controlling applications that run on an iPhone. You have to pay $99 to join and Apple has to approve your application but so long as you play nice by their rules I gather this is a formality.

One aspect of Apple that many iPhone developers hate is the NDA. It restricts what people can publish and many are hoping it will be eventually waived. So even if I wanted to (and you wanted me to), I'm not sure just yet how much I can publish about it though I can certainly add Objective C/C++ if you are interested in it. So tell me!

• Link to C Tutorials
• Link to So you want to be a games developer article?